Larry Heinemann

Larry Heinemann
Larry Curtis Heinemann (January 18, 1944 – December 11, 2019) was an American novelist born and raised in Chicago. His published work – three novels and a memoir – is primarily concerned with the Vietnam War.
Life
Heinemann served a combat tour as a conscripted draftee in the Vietnam War from 1967 to 1968 with the 25th Infantry Division, and described himself as the most ordinary of soldiers.
He received a B.A. from Columbia College, Chicago in 1971, taught creative writing there for fifteen years, and meanwhile wrote his own first and second novels. In 1986 he resigned over a furious argument about nepotism and academic freedom.
Paco's Story was published later that year.
Afterward Heinemann received literature fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts, and a Fulbright Scholarship to research Vietnamese folklore, legends, and mythology at Huế University. He also taught on the faculty of the University of Southern California in the Masters of Professional Writing Program. He worked as Texas A&M University's Writer in Residence until his retirement in 2015. He died December 11, 2019, of chronic obstructive pulmonary disease in Bryan, Texas.
Writer
Heinemann's prose style is blunt and straightforward, reflecting his working-class background. He drew most directly on his Vietnam experience in his first novel Close Quarters which was published in 1977.
His second and critically most acclaimed novel is Paco's Story, which won the 1987 U.S. National Book Award for Fiction
in a major surprise that has remained controversial, as Toni Morrison’s novel Beloved was widely expected to win. Other critics and essayists thought the award appropriate and well deserved. At the time, Heinemann's only comment on the controversy was that the check for $10,000 was already cashed and the Louise Nevelson sculpture was not likely to be returned.
Paco's Story relates the postwar experiences of its protagonist, haunted by the ghosts of his dead comrades who provide the novel's distinctive narrative voice. (Ghost stories are common in both American and Vietnamese literature about the war.)
The story deals with the seemingly contradictory and morally ambiguous role of the soldier as both victimizer and victim. The Women's Publishing House, Nha Xuat Phu Nu of Hanoi, published Paco's Story in December 2010, translated by Pham Anh Tuan, with an introduction by celebrated Vietnamese novelist Bao Ninh. It is the first American-written war novel published in Vietnam.
His third novel, Cooler by the Lake (1992), is a comic story about Chicago. A petty thief gets into awful trouble when he attempts to return to its owner a wallet with eight $100 bills in it. Thematically lighter than his first novels, it was less positively received.
Heinemann's military experiences are documented in his book, Black Virgin Mountain (2005), a memoir. It chronicles his several returns to Vietnam and his personal and political views concerning the country and the war. He often referred to his two war novels and the memoir as an accidental trilogy.
Heinemann's short stories and non-fiction have appeared in Atlantic Monthly, GRAPHIS, Harper's, Penthouse, Playboy, and Tri-Quarterly magazines, as well as Van Nghe, the Vietnam Writers Association Journal of Arts and Letters in Ha Noi, and numerous anthologies including The Other Side of Heaven, Writing Between the Lines, Vietnam Anthology, Best of the Tri-Quarterly, Lesebuch der wilden Männer, The Vintage Book of War Stories, Veterans of War, Veterans of Peace (edited by Maxine Hong Kingston), and most recently in Humor Me, edited by Ian Frazier.
His work has been translated into Dutch, German, French, Spanish, and Vietnamese.
References
External links
1997 interview with Larry Heinemann from The Atlantic Monthly
2003 interview with Larry Heinemann from Logos: A Journal of Modern Society and Culture
Mobility and Transformation: Engaging the Enemy in Larry Heinemann's Paco's Story (academic paper on gender and enmity in Paco's Story)
1944 births
2019 deaths
20th-century American novelists
20th-century American memoirists
American male novelists
United States Army personnel of the Vietnam War
National Book Award winners
Columbia College Chicago alumni
Columbia College Chicago faculty
Texas A&M University faculty
United States Army soldiers
Novelists from Chicago
Novelists from Texas
Military personnel from Illinois
American male non-fiction writers
20th-century American male writers